No club spent more money in the January transfer window than Barcelona and the key departure of Neymar a few months before can be held up as one key reason for the Catalans', and many others', splurges.Paris Saint-Germain, like Real Madrid, were oddly quiet in the winter market for a variety of reasons but their rivals switched their view of the mid-season window in a way previously unseen."Before, clubs could see it as a low-cost, short-term market, in which teams came looking sbobet88888 for players to give an immediate performance boost," explains Esteve Calzada of Prime Time Sport."Now, clubs are making long-term, strategic transfers."Prime Time Sport's report details how the 222 million euro sale of Neymar funded the Blaugrana's 360m euro spree throughout the past two windows, most of which went on Ousmane Dembele and Philippe Coutinho.Subtracting the incoming fees for Neymar, Javier Mascherano and Cristian Tello, the outlay drops considerably to a more manageable 125m euros.Thus it was a domino effect from Paris to Barcelona that enabled them to splash the cash, which in turn triggered Liverpool's club record signing of Virgil van Dijk from Southampton.A number of other top clubs made sbobet88888 significant purchases in January; Arsenal brought in Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Manchester City swooped for Aymeric Laporte - both club record deals - whilst Manchester United handed a whopping salary to Alexis Sanchez and Atletico Madrid signed Diego Costa.Other key patterns are also emerging, such as how players are more often moving for their release clause, including Neymar, Laporte, Inigo Martinez, Cedric Bakambu, Dani Ceballos and Vitolo.Given that such a clause is mandatory in Spain, the volatile market can make it very hard to predict a player's worth at the moment of signing a contract, particularly a long-term one.Furthermore, Madrid's inactivity for January was partly due to a busy summer, however the impact of new players has been minimal when taking the percentage of minutes actually played into account.For example, Theo Hernandez and Ceballos have featured in just 18 percent and 11 percent of Real's minutes since joining, respectively, which is a far cry from Paulinho's 58 percent at the Camp Nou. sbobet88888